Security seals are used to limit access to, or prevent tampering with, items that are under strict inventory control, items such as company equipment, materials being shipped in bond, or government controlled commodities. The security seals commonly used are tags or labels that lock or glue on the inventoried items in a manner that prevents the seals from being removed without leaving evidence of the post-inventory tampering in the form of damaged or destroyed seals.
Security seals are used to track wildlife hides and other wildlife products that are traded commercially under government license, regulation, quota, or export/import permit. For example, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international treaty with 116 signatory member nations that is administered by the United Nation Environment Programme, prohibits international trade in some wildlife commodities unless the articles are tagged with self-locking, non-reusable security seals. The security seals must be on raw (untanned) wildlife hides moving in international commerce during exportation from the country of natal origin, during transshipment through intermediate countries, and during importation into the final destination country. The seals must also remain on the hides through the tanning process and up to the point that the hides are cut into the pieces that will be used in manufacturing the retail product. Similar tagging regulations are mandated by U.S. federal and state wildlife agencies in relation to commercial trading in several North American wildlife species.
The seals usually bear a distinctive logo or emblem and a unique number or alphanumeric code. In order to track a series of inventoried items, seals may bear consecutive numbers or sequential codes. To deter alteration, the numbers or codes usually are permanently imprinted, embossed, or burned into the seal, and they may be in the form of human readable characters or electronically readable bar codes. To discourage counterfeiting, the color of the material the seal is made from, the color and design of the logo/emblem, the form of the numbering or coding, the sequence of numbers or codes, and the color of the numbering or coding (human readable or bar code) may be varied periodically.
During tanning, some types of wildlife hides are soaked sequentially in a series of extremely alkaline (pH 11.0) and strongly acidic (pH 1.0) chemical solutions. To pass unscathed through the tanning process, the seals used on wildlife hides must be inert to these corrosive chemicals.
Although a number of seals are currently used to tag CITES or U.S. government controlled raw wildlife hides, none are completely satisfactory.
The seals most widely used on wildlife hides are plastic door seals. They consist of polyethylene or nylon straps, one end (the tongue) of which loops around to lock into the other end (the lock or head). A plastic door seal is usually chemically inert, but when the seal is inserted through the hide and the ends locked together, it forms a large open loop which, during tannage, snags on other hides and on tanning equipment. When that occurs, the chemically-softened hide tears and the tag falls off. In addition, plastic door seals can be unlocked and reused, an undesirable characteristic for a security seal.
The metal loops in plastic-and-metal padlock seals are not inert to tanning chemicals, and both plastic-and-metal and all plastic padlock seals snag on other hides and on tanning equipment, tear the hide, and fall off.
Plastic pull-tight seals, such as bundle ties of the types disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,605,199 or 3,735,449, can be removed, which allows illegal dealers to remove the tags from inventoried hides for reuse on poached hides.
Metal door seals and metal ball seals are not inert and react with the chemicals used to tan raw hides. The resulting metal salts stain the hides, and during tanning the eroded tags cut and scratch the chemically softened hides.
Lead-and-wire seals and cable seals are easily counterfeited. In addition, they are not chemically inert and fall off after being attacked by the chemicals used to tan raw hides, and the resulting metal salts stain the hides and contaminate the tanning formula.
Permanently glued polyolefin door seals are sufficiently inert to withstand most tanning chemicals, but when the hides are dyed, the tags readily accept the color, which obscures the numbers and codes.
As is made evident from the foregoing, a need exists for an inert, tamper-proof, snag-resistant seal capable of containing coded information.